Best Wordpress Stats Application: Mint. Best $30 I’ve Spent In A Long Time.

A few weeks ago I was getting frustrated with not being able to get a proper handle on what was happening on my Wordpress blog. I was getting frustrated as depending on which tool I used, I was getting between 1-8k visitors per day, 1.5-14 pageviews per visit and 2-30K page views per day! I can’t tell you how frustrating this was for someone who analyses trends and stats for a living.
I decided to invest in Mint last week and I’m glad that I did. Mint, may not be free like some other apps, but $30 isn’t a lot of money and the amount of site intelligence it has provided me is worth way more than a measly $30.

Installation was a breeze, and out of the box Mint provides the following stats:

• Visit Information: Split by unique and total visitors
• Pages: Split by most popular and most recent. You also have the facility to keep an eye on particular pages by adding them to the ‘watched’ list
• Referrers: This pane shows the newest unique referrers to your blog, as well as the most recent and also repeat referrers.
• Searches: shows where my search traffic is coming from. I can even see upfront what terms were used, and how many times

Straight away Mint proved its value by showing that I’m getting more repeat traffic than I thought, with 2 visits per person each day on average. This has made me realise the importance of not posting everything in one go even if I do write all my posts in one session, and staggering when posts go live to try and encourage repeat visits.
It’s also reinforced my discovery of the importance of my feed users. The search stats also highlighted to me how much traffic I was getting for ‘Playstation 3 Preorder’, where I was ranked #2 on Google without realising. Although, I’ve just realised this morning that I haven’t yet managed to take advantage of my high ranking yet (see later).
The real power of Mint though is its extensibility through the use of peppers. These work like Wordpress plugins and allow additional functionality to be added quickly. So, far I’ve added 3 peppers from the many available:

1. Referrer Rollup: This shows the domains of my top referrers with the pages neatly displayed below
2. Adsense Click Pepper: This pepper tracks Google Ads Unit Number, Size and the Page it was clicked on. This in my view is priceless, as I don’t know of any other app or plugin that provides this level of info of Adsense stats
3. User Agent 007: This pepper shows what browser, operating system, resolution etc my readers are using

The data and insight I’ve gained from the peppers is incredible:

• The majority of my readers use Internet Explorer which means I now check my site daily to make sure the template is ok in IE, which I never did before as I’m a committed Firefox user
• My Adsense revenue has been up about 80% this week and I thought it was because of the additional Playstation 3 traffic, but looking at the stats I can now see it’s from my traditional big-hitting articles. One priority today is to work out how to get that page generating money
• The referrer rollup has really hit home how dependant I am on Google for traffic. I think I’m doing ok on this site for SEO, but today I’m going to see if there is anything else I can do to optimize my template
• The referrer rollup has also highlighted how poor my traffic is from Yahoo! and other search engines, despite Yahoo! constantly crawling my pages. I’m not sure if this is typical for blogs, but I’m convinced my Google traffic shouldn’t be x15 higher. One of my tasks today is optimising my site for Yahoo! and other search engines

I feel so much more confident now that I will, after 18 months of blogging, finally get an accurate picture of what is happening on Connected Internet, which will hopefully allow me to make the site more interesting for readers and to also improve traffic.

If you want to give a Mint a whirl then click here. Even if you’re not a serious blogger I guarantee it’ll be the best $30 you’ve spent in a while.

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